Did you find it a little odd that Uncle Steve made such a big deal about the whole "unrestricted encoding" issue at the iTunes intro back in January? We did. We sort of took it for granted that if we wanted to MP3ify our CD collection, we should be able to do it at the highest quality that suited us. We're supposed to get excited about Apple letting us choose what encoding rate to use? Gee, can we send Steve a fruit basket for letting us name our hard drives, too?

Of course, now we're hearing that MP3-encoding under Windows XP (yet another Redmond attempt at a consumer OS that doesn't suck) will be crippled on purpose, in a sneaky bid to get customers to switch to Microsoft's proprietary WMA format instead. According to the Wall Street Journal, customers who use Windows XP's pre-loaded software to rip their CDs into MP3 format will get garbage out, since Microsoft "plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file." Meanwhile, the same tracks converted to WMA will mysteriously sound much better and take up less disk space. The obvious hope is that clueless Windows users will abandon the commie MP3 format in droves, switching to WMA instead ("because it's obviously better!") and thus further padding Microsoft's wallet. Gosh, we wish we had a monopoly to abuse-- it really looks like fun!

Now, the way we see it, this could play out in Apple's favor. Since MP3 is so wildly popular and has such a massive mind share lead over WMA, Microsoft's attempt to suppress MP3 by sneakily making it sound worse might actually drive customers to the Mac; out of the box, an iMac lets customers rip their CD tracks at any quality they like, upload them seamlessly to their MP3 players, and burn them effortlessly to new CDs. No muss, no fuss, and no proprietary media format being shoved down their throats. (Apple embracing existing standards over a new proprietary technology? We're still not used to that; thank heavens for the Apple Display Connector, or we'd be suffering some serious withdrawal.)

Granted, it's not likely that Microsoft's MP3-squishing tactics are going to send iMac sales through the roof, and it's probably far likelier that most Windows XP users will in fact switch to WMA as the path of least resistance; "all shall bow before Redmond," etc. Another possibility, though, is that most people tasteless enough to use Windows voluntarily will be so used to mediocrity that they won't even notice that their XP-produced MP3s sound lousy in the first place, and thus won't see any point in switching to WMA. Whoops! Gee, it's so unlike Microsoft to miss a detail like that...